Checklists are lousy companions

 This week's verses are Romans 7:1-6:

Or do you not know, brothers and sisters (for I am speaking to those who know the Law), that the Law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives? For the married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he is alive; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband. So then, if while her husband is alive she gives herself to another man, she will be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress if she gives herself to another man.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in regard to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were brought to light by the Law, were at work in the parts of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.

The world is full of followers of flowcharts and checklists. They understand the technique but not the craft. But then there are followers of examples, people who imitate another's mastery, who learn both technique and craft. These people are disciples.

In the Old Testament, as God was tilling Israel's ground to prepare for his entry into the world, he gave them a checklist of things they should do to produce a "good enough" version of righteousness. This checklist is what we know as the old testament law.

If you want to do things on your own, the checklist can get you most of the way there. But it'll never take you all the way. Nobody in history ever managed it, even if some of us got very close to getting it right. Still, the checklist was all people had, and they became virtuosos of box-ticking, making great shows of their virtue as they performed the showiest and easiest things on the list. But they never got it all.

People got so used to following the checklist that they began to think that righteousness was the checklist. They became bound to it, and enslaved by it, and when God wanted them to do something more nuanced, or more bold, they would cling to the checklist and turn their backs on him.

This was a problem even after Jesus died on the cross to give us a better way. People were used to just going to the list, and were still judging each others' success based on how elegantly they could seem to check all the boxes. They were free, but they weren't living like it.

So Paul explains their situation really well. It's like they were married to someone who died, and refused to believe the marriage was over. They were like a widow who was unwilling to remarry because she was still trying to be faithful to someone who had no claim on her anymore. That could be a real problem when it's Jesus coming as the potential suitor, and the church is there in their black dress and long tassels refusing to unwrap their arms from the stone slabs Moses left behind ages ago.

When we become Christians, our old life and way of doing things dies, and we are reborn under a different system. We still do many of the good things the checklists used to tell us to do, but we do them for different reasons. We do them out of love rather than obligation. We make sacrifices of ourselves, not of others.

The law was meant like a scaffold to help us to learn to do the right things, but it became more like a prison. We followed it in a way that made us worse people rather than better. We became judgmental, guilt-ridden, arrogant, two-faced hypocrites who were taught to the test without ever learning the material. It turned us into monsters. If our first steps into Christianity were a death and rebirth, the death at least was well deserved and probably overdue.

But we're like that widow. We don't want to let go of that familiar-yet-horrific previous relationship we had with the law. We want to be moralistic beings, elbowing our way to the top of the virtue-signaling leaderboard, blowing our trumpets and making great shows of our charity. We want to be the ones deciding who is worthy and who is not. We want that nice, predictable, finite list, not the infinite God who surprises us with crimson flowers and inconvenient thorns.

Paul talks to us about bearing fruit, which doesn't mean as much now as it once did. For most of us, fruit is something that comes in a plastic bag in a supermarket. We hear that it comes from trees, but we take that on faith. In Jesus' day, and Paul's, people were a little cozier with the farmers, and they knew the time and work it took for the trees to do their jobs. So when Paul is talking to us about bearing the fruit of death or the fruit of God, he's talking about an authentic, organic process, not a plastic bag full of mealy, leather-skinned apples or waxy, spray-painted oranges that come from the back of a truck.

So, how do we bear fruit, as people? It's a mix of relationship, life, and some unavoidable labor. You marry someone and you bear their child. It's you, authentically, but it's also who you partnered with. It's an outgrowth of who you are, and as predictable as an apple tree bearing apples, and an orange tree bearing oranges.

We are given the choice between being checklist-jockeys and being disciples. If we choose the paper with the tick-boxes on it, we choose something with no life. We partner with death, and after a smug and self-congratulatory gestation period, we give birth to hypocrisy, self-righteousness, legalism, and a host of other bratty offspring.

But if we choose discipleship, we choose God himself. We choose the source of life. And over time, we give birth to what Paul describes as the fruit of the spirit: love, kindness, generosity, selflessness, and so on. Our offspring look like their father, and he is proud.

Most of us are not new Christians, but some of us have not made the full transition over to the new way of living. Take some time to mull these verses over, and ask yourself whether you've entered fully into this new relationship, or whether you're still living alone with your checklist, pretending that this is as good as your life gets.